Text 3590, 65 rader
Skriven 2009-10-28 00:30:07 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
     Kommentar till en text av Dale Shipp (1:261/1466.0)
Ärende: Charset
===============
Hello Dale,

On Monday October 26 2009 23:28, you wrote to me:

 DS> I've never found anything that I like better than Bluewave with QWK
 DS> packets. I've experimented with a number of sysop editors, and none of
 DS> them have come close.

Frankly I never understood why you go through the complication of running a BBS
at all if it is not publicly accessible.

Oh well, never mind...

 DS>> Then what is *the* standard -- or is it that there is no standard?

 MVDV>> There is no universally accepted standard for characters
 MVDV>> outside the ASCII  range .

 DS> Finally, a straight answer to a straight question.  Thanks.

Hmmm. I thought I already made that clear three messages ago when you claimed
CP437 is *the* standard. Oh well, never mind.

 DS> And I hope that you don't try to implement the acceptance of any
 DS> single standard for fido.

Even if I wanted to, that is not in my power.

 MVDV>> So if no kludge indicating the character set is present, one does
 MVDV>> not know what character ancoding is used for characters outside the
 MVDV>> ASCII range. No CHRS kludge signals "ASCII only".

 DS> No CHRS kludge means that you don't know what I use on my system.

That is a possible consequence, but what you *signal* is "ASCII only".

 DS> And yet I have Björn's name programmed as a macro in my editor that I
 DS> use to write messages.  He sees it just fine, as intended.

As I explained: by sheer luck. It works only as long as the other side uses a
character encoding that uses the same code position for the "o with diereses"
as IBM codepage 437. These are Codepages 437, 850, 852, 857 and 860. Any other
of the dozen+ encodings that I have seen in use and the result will be garbage.
On a system that has LATIN-x as the default, it will not display at all, since
in LATIN-x that code position is a control character. On a system using the
Western Europe Windows character set, it will display as a closing double
quote. On a system using CP866 - the default for our friends in the East, it
will display as CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER EF. In UTF-8 it will not display as the
single byte 94H is an illegal sequence in UTF-8. Lots of ways it cab go wrong..

Ever so often people resist change. Especially if they do not see the change as
an improvement, if they see no advantage for themselves and if they feel it is
forced on them. Sometimes people are successful in staving of the change. Most
of the time they can only delay the inevitable. The world around us is changing
and one of the changes is the move toward Unicode. It will end the mess of the
multitude of character sets for good. The FidoNet community has the choice to
follow or to stay behind.


Cheers, Michiel

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